


Did Not Do The Research

by Quicksilver_ink



Category: Princess Tutu
Genre: Critical Research Failure, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:52:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5467331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quicksilver_ink/pseuds/Quicksilver_ink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fakir has, at best, a tenuous grasp of physics.<br/>Fakir can change reality with his writing.<br/>Fakir really, really needs to use a beta-reader.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Did Not Do The Research

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bienenalster (pinkspider)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkspider/gifts).



> For bienenalster, who asked for Fakir warping reality by his ignorance of Science!

_The sun rose, its soft light spreading slowly across the sky, like a drop of golden paint in water, placed in the east by a careful hand. As the dawn’s light touched the sleeping duck, her yellow feathers started to glow, dimly at first, but eventually so brilliant there was nothing but a blinding blur where she had been, like a smaller version of the rising sun. And then it faded, and where the duck had been was the curled, sleeping form of a girl..._

* * *

“Quak?” 

Fakir paused, his toast halfway to his mouth, and looked down. A pair of blue eyes gazed soulfully up at him from across the table.

“Quak?” the duck repeated, plaintively. 

“No, you can’t have any,” he told her. 

“Quak!” 

Fakir frowned. “You’ve got oats and corn.”

Ducks, as a general rule, are not particularly good at looking peeved, but the glare Ahiru shot him was unmistakable. (Then again, as a general rule, ducks are not blue-eyed, or capable of understanding human speech. Ahiru was exceptional in more ways than one.)

“Bread’s empty calories for ducks,” Fakir told her, trying for reason. “I looked it up! It’d be like having ice cream for breakfast.”

“Quak.” Ahiru shook her head and resettled her wings irritably. Then she grudgingly lowered her head and nipped at the pile of damp grains. Fakir ignored the low grumble-quacks she produced and resumed his own breakfast. 

He had only gotten a few bites into his toast when a pounding on his front door almost made him choke.

“Fakir, wake up! Wake up! This is important!” Autor’s voice was barely intelligible over the loud, shuddering thumps of his fists on the front door.

Fakir yanked the door open. “I’m awake. What is-”

“You’ve been writing again,” Autor announced, thrusting an accusatory finger in Fakir’s face with such force that the writer almost stumbled back. 

Fakir regained his balance and glared down at the finger. “Yes. I’m in a writing class. One that I enrolled in at your repeated, and unending, and very annoying insistence.”

“Yes, because you need to hone your craft! As a scion of Drosselmeyer-”

“I don’t care about Drosselmeyer, I just want to help Ahiru!”

The duck in question, who’d been creeping across the table, froze guiltily at the sound of her name.

“You can’t just write willy-nilly, you need-”

“Autor, is there a reason you came to yell at me, or can I go back to eating my breakfast?” Fakir interrupted, planting a hand on the table. Uneaven-legged, it wobbled, the dishes rattled, and Ahiru, now half a foot from rom his plate, hopped back with a squawk. 

“Oh. Ahem.” Autor adjusted his glasses. “The sun rose in the east today,” he intoned ominously.

Two sets of eyes blinked at him. “So? That’s where it’s supposed to come up,” Fakir said, nonplussed.

“Not in December, it doesn’t! It rises in the southeast. A full 40 degrees south of east, in fact.” Autor pushed his glasses up his nose smugly.

Unnoticed by either of them, Ahiru inched back towards Fakir’s plate.

“And this is my fault, how?”

“You’re the only one in town with Drosselmeyer’s powers! You must’ve written something that came true. Did you use your quill pen at all this week?”

Fakir, avoided his gaze. “Just once. But it didn’t work.”

“How do you know that?” Autor demanded. “I can think of no reason other than-”

Fakir jerked a thumb in the direction of the table. The both turned to look at Ahiru, who at that moment had a slice of toast larger than her head clamped firmly in her bill. She blinked back at them, gave a (somewhat muffled, on account of the toast) squawk, and fled with an awkward flurry of yellow wings.

“Ahiru!” Fakir shook his head and turned to Autor. “See?”

“Let me see it anyway,” came the other’s cross reply.

Fakir fumbled around in his stack of drafts, more to buy time than because he wasn’t sure where the paper was. Even once he had it in hand, he hesitated long enough that Autor simply snatched it out of his grasp.

“Hmm.” Autor stared at the page with an intense gaze, scowling as he tried to decode the scratchings-out and Fakir’s inspiration-hurried cursive. “I thought so. You said the sun came up in the east.”

“Sorry,” Fakir muttered, trying not to sound relieved. There was a reason he hated showing his writing to Autor.

“Also, your sentences are run-on. This one here needs to be split into two at least. Where’s a pen?”

Fakir snatched the paper back. “Never you mind.”

Autor adjusted his glasses and glared back. “You won’t get any better if you don’t learn how to edit-”

“Look, I’ll fix the sun thing. Anything else wrong? With reality, not my story.”

“Just the sun,” Autor allowed. “But make sure to use similes instead of metaphors. Just to be on the safe side.”

* * *

After the incident with the sun, Fakir didn’t so much as touch the quill pen for the rest of the week.

Fakir and Ahiru usually visited Charon Sunday afternoons, staying until well past dinner. But this week the smith had taken one look at the graying sky, rubbed his knee, and sent the two of them back home after only an hour, fretting about the weather. So when dusk fell, Fakir found himself at loose ends. With the wind starting to whistle outside it ought to have been an ideal night for reading by the fire, warm and snug in his house. Instead, the wind made him restless. He wandered to the window overlooking the pond, only to walk away moments later so many times Ahiru stopped following him. 

He was gazing out at the pond again, thinking -- wasn’t it odd how black the ice looked with only moonlight? During the day the ice was white, or clear, but without light it transforms.

He felt he was on the cusp of some important realization… but an aggravated quack broke his reverie. 

When he turned, Ahiru was trying to shove her basket closer to the fire. She butted her head against it to no avail. 

“Sorry.” Fakir nudged it half a foot nearer with his foot. “Better?”

From her pleased quack, it seemed to be. 

He watched as she settled down in the basket, shifting her weight and resettling her wings until she was comfortable. She seemed happy like this, or at least content, and once again he wondered if it was really the right thing to do, to keep trying to write her back to being a human girl. Was it really for her sake, or his?

He refilled the small bowls of food and water that they kept by her bed -- she couldn’t operate the faucet or open the cupboards if she wanted a drink or a midnight snack -- and checked the wood stacked by the fireplace. Satisfied, he paced back to the window. 

The ice was still black, and Fakir wondered if it was thick enough yet to support weight. Human weight -- Ahiru would be fine as she was. Come to think of it, she could have managed it as Princess Tutu as well -- she’d danced across the surface of Kraehe’s lake. But of course, that was back when they were still living in the story, and she could transform from duck to girl to fairytale princess with ease.

Hmmm...

* * *

_The small duck skated across the frictionless surface of the frozen pond, a faint figure under the starlight. She was awkward, ungainly at first, but she didn’t give up. Even when a misstep sent her careening into a snowdrift at the pond’s edge, she would pull herself out, shake off the snow, and try again. Her tenacity paid off, and her clumsy movements grew slowly more graceful. And as her sliding and flailing wings transitioned to the controlled movements of a dance, so too did her body begin to change. Slowly, quietly, her legs lengthened, feathers shortened. Webbed feet became bare toes, unfurled wing became a gracefully arching arm._

* * *

The next morning, Fakir woke early to irate quacking and a heavy weight on his chest. He cracked one eye open.

“You’re noisy,” he grumbled at the yellow sphere covering most of his vision. “I’m sitting up. Get off me before you fall.”

Ahiru waddled further down the bed. When he’d rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he saw that she’d puffed out all of her feathers. And when he climbed out of bed, she rushed to huddle among the blankets.

The fire in the hearth was down to coals. Fakir coaxed it back to life, adding kindling and making sure it caught before settling a few larger split logs. Ahiru watched him, still a walking puffball. 

They’d finished breakfast and the traditional argument over toast before Autor pounded at the door. Once again, he was shouting and banging at the same time. Once again, Fakir yanked open the door. This time he sidestepped the other young man’s Finger of Judgement.

“Show me the story,” Autor demanded. He was breathing heavily and leaning on the doorsill. “Now.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll get it” 

As Fakir went to his writing desk, Ahiru quacked reproachfully at their visitor.

“And come inside and close the door,” Fakir added, not looking back. “It’s cold outside.”

Autor had taken off his shoes and was stiffly moving towards the table when Fakir returned.

“Say one word about about run-on sentences and I’m never letting you look at my writing again,” Fakir warned.

Autor winced as he slid into the chair. “All right. Just let me see it!”

He scowled over the handwritten page for over a minute. Then he looked up at Fakir. “Frictionless ice. Really, Fakir.”

“What’s wrong with that? It’s slippery,” Fakir retorted.

Autor adjusted his glasses, and Fakir braced himself for the impending nerd rant. 

“Ahem. The force due to friction is a force which acts in the opposite direction of motion along a surface, Its magnitude is equal to that of the normal force multiplied by the coefficient of friction of the two surfaces in contact. For example, waxed wood on wet snow has a different coefficient of friction than waxed wood on dry snow. This is why conditions matter for skiing--”

“Get to the point!”

Autor cleared his throat. “The point is that without friction, you have no traction. Walking becomes impossible. Not just difficult, impossible. So does skiing, for that matter, and skating. You cannot get started without something to push off of, and once you’re moving… you never stop unless you run into something. Newton’s First Law still applies.” He raised an arm to adjust his glasses, winced, then glared at Fakir. “And we had freezing rain overnight. The streets might as well be paved with ice. Staying upright is… a challenge, at the least; a lot of people have fallen. And once you fall, there’s no way to get off the ice…”

Fakir winced. This was a problem. To cover his discomfort, he asked, “So how did you get here?”

Autor took some time before answering. “I leveraged my knowledge of physics and principles of motion, such as Newton’s third law -- that is, every action has an equal and opposite reaction -- and carefully calculated trajectories so that-”

Fakir raised an eyebrow and exchanged glances with Ahiru. 

“You mean you slid on your butt and shoved off of things until you got here,” Fakir said. “After falling down a lot.”

Autor turned beet red. “I-- grant me some dignity, I did not--” he spluttered. 

Ahiru’s quiet quack sounded a bit like a snicker.

* * *

The ice incident left Fakir quite daunted, although he wouldn’t admit it to Autor. But the ice had been dangerous -- everyone moved gingerly in dance class that day, sore from their falls. One of his writing classmates was on crutches. Fakir felt a guilty twinge whenever he looked at him. He was no Drosselmeyer -- his writing wasn’t supposed to hurt people, it was supposed to help them. Help Ahiru.

When mathematics ended, he followed his classmates into the corridor, still preoccupied. Should I even keep trying to change things? he wondered, and promptly walked straight into a student coming from the other direction. Both of their books tumbled to the ground.

“F-Fakir! I’m so sorry!” the girl stammered. “I wasn’t looking where I was going…” She bent to retrieve the fallen books, reaching with her left arm. Her right was in a sling.

“It was my fault,” Fakir told the bent head. The bright hair in a tight bun looked familiar, and when he squatted to help, the blushing face was familiar. “Here.” He handed Piqué her books.

She stammered more apologies, and thanks, then fled. Fakir watched her run, made awkward by the slinged arm, and shook his head. If he was hurting even Ahiru’s friends now… it was better to sto-

“- got a 1+ on the paper, of course. Frau Professor Schildkröte says she doesn’t normally give them, but…” Autor’s self-assured voice preceded him down the hallway.

Fakir set his jaw, shifted his books to under his left arm, and stalked down the hallway. He kept his eyes forward and his path straight, and Autor’s companions automatically stepped to the side as he approached.

Autor did not. His head remained high, tilted arrogantly, “...said I had an impressive bibliography,” he was saying, and smirked broadly just as his and Fakir’s trajectories passed. “Of course, _I_ know how to do research.”

That tore it. Fakir let his right shoulder collide with Autor’s as they passed. The other dropped his books.

“Hmmph,” Fakir snorted as he walked away. He knew it was petty, and he was sure Ahiru wouldn’t approve of him resuming the cold, superior attitude he’d adopted before they met, but it felt good to turn it on Autor just now.

He was aware that it was petty. He didn’t care. He would show that smug bastard that he could damn well do the research, and help Ahiru in the process.

* * *

_The duck settled in for the night, her bill tucked under a wing. The wind tugged gently, ruffling the barbs of her contour feathers. It was growing colder, the days shorter, but the duck stayed warm, thanks to the fluffy down feathers, barbules floating free and lighter than air, under the stiffer, golden vaned feathers. Strong but light, this was what allowed the bird to fly. Moonlight glinted off the rachis of a single wing flight-feather, silver on the golden; then the duck shifted in her sleep and the light fell on another, and another. Soon she was covered with pale silver slivers of light, which widened until the humble form of the duck was eclipsed. The brilliant glow rose in the air, like an egg of light, growing in size. Then it cracked, darkness piercing the blinding brilliance and revealing the form of a girl, arms and knees tucked to her chest._

Fakir carefully wiped the ink from the pen’s nib before carefully laying the quill on the table. He stretched a cramped hand. Strange how sometimes the words seemed to tumble onto the page of almost their own accord, and other times -- like this -- every word seemed to be dredged from the aether with excruciating effort. Still, it was done. And he’d checked it against Habits and Anatomy of Waterfowl, twice. 

Fakir sighed and leaned back in his chair, then glanced over at Ahiru. She was dozing in her basket again, as she had been since just after dinner. It worried him a little, since ducks weren’t supposed to hibernate. Maybe it was because she hadn’t gone south and sundown was early? Although, if he stayed up late enough she’d sometimes wake and keep him company as he read or wrote. 

She didn’t seem likely to wake, since her breathing was slow now. He watched the even rise and fall of her feathery sides. Rise, fall. Rise, fall. Rise, rise…

Fakir stared at his friend, breathing as shallowly as he could, afraid his breath might disrupt what was unfolding. It was working, his story was working.. Ahiru was growing -- no, rising in the air. She cleared her basket, sleep-limp legs dangling, and ascended until she was floating around knee-level, like a feathery yellow day-old hydrogen balloon.

Once there, she hovered, still asleep. Other than her breathing, she didn’t seem to change size or shape; nor did she glow.

Heart pounding, Fakir looked back at the parchment before him. Was his power insufficient, and only enough to make her rise in the air? Perhaps he should’ve written her begin to change form first, although it had felt… right, somehow, to talk about Ahiru floating up in the air as she transformed. Maybe he needed to write more about her in girl-shape? He reached automatically for his pen…

...which wasn’t there.

Frantic, knocking the chair over in his haste to rise, Fakir cast about for the quill he’d written with. It wasn’t on the table, it wasn’t on the ground…

The crash of the chair on the ground woke Ahiru, who uttered a few sleepy quacks before launching into a full-fledged ruckus, bellowing her distress at finding herself floating midair. She beat her wings madly, trying to take flight, which only made her bob erratically in place.

“Ahiru! Ahiru, calm down, it’s all right!” Fakir knelt on the ground and reached for her, only to have his hands smacked away by her frantically-beating wings.

Finally he caught ahold of her, speaking soothingly, and she stopped flapping and let him hold her to his chest. He could feel her tiny heart hammering in her small chest. She felt horribly fragile in his hands, lighter than he remembered.

“Shhh… It’s all right, Ahiru, it’s all right.”

“Quaaaaa_aaaaaaa_aak,” Ahiru replied plaintively. 

“It wasn’t a dream,” Fakir said, taking a stab at what she might have thought. “I’m sorry. It was my fault. I’m not sure why it happened, but I know it’s my doing.”

“Quak..” This time, her tone was sheepish. “Quak?” And inquisitive.

“I was… I was writing again,” Fakir admitted haltingly. Good grief, this was embarrassing… at least Autor wasn’t here. “I was... … well, I thought…” He tried to set her down back in her basket, to buy himself time. 

She floated upwards almost instantly. Frantic quacking and wing-flapping resumed. 

Fakir’s embarrassment and worry gave way to frustration. “Ahiru! Ducks are used to floating!” he snapped. “Don’t panic over such a silly thing, you idiot.”

She stopped mid-wingthrash, folded her wings at her sides, turned up her head with an audible “hmmph!”, and paddled away, gliding through the air as if it were the pond out back. “Quak quak _quakakak_ quak,” she muttered darkly. “Quak.” 

Fakir found his pen up near the ceiling. 

* * *

The next few days, Fakir stayed home from school, pleading a cold. He was going to get to the bottom of this, and he’d damn well make sure Autor didn’t find out until he’d succeeded.

He wrote and discarded draft after draft. Ahiru suffered her feathers turning to literal gold, another floating incident (Fakir made sure to read up on both flight and density after that), and, after an embarrassing grammatical error made rather late one night, a temporary change of sex. Fakir had heard other languages, like English and Japanese, didn’t use masculine, feminine, and neuter the way German did, and he wondered whether things would be easier if he’d grown up speaking one of those languages, or if Ahiru would’ve found herself sporting a male mallard’s green head-feathers on multiple occasions.

Both of them received bruises from passing in front of a mirror after Fakir had ascribed too much force to light as it bounced off a hero’s sword, and both had near-misses when a mistake describing iron had heavily magnetized all of the metal in the house. The small house was filled waist-high with porridge when Fakir knocked over the pot on the stove the morning after staying up all night writing a fairytale where a duck turned out to be an enchanted princess. 

Autor showed up only twice. Once, to yell at Fakir for changing the night sky (how was he supposed to have known the North Star wasn’t that bright?) and for violating the first law of thermodynamics. 

The second time was on the Solstice, at the middle of the night.

Fakir was asleep when Autor arrived, the other young man again pounding on the door and shouting as had become his habit. But it was Ahiru who let him in, flying up and pulling the bolt aside before Fakir had quite figured out that the thumps were real and not something leftover from his fragmented dreams.

“Where is it?” Autor was shouting at the duck when Fakir entered the main room. There was light, which he hadn’t expected -- Autor had brought a lantern. Shadows stretched, thin and ominous, from the feet of Autor and the table. 

“The story? Where did he put it?” He pulled books off the shelves, rifling through them and then dropping them in a pile of discards on the floor in any old order. Fakir was as shocked to see Autor’s disregard for the welfare of the books as he was to see the young man himself.

One dropped volume -- flung, really -- narrowly missed Ahiru. “Quak!”

“Stop quacking and tell me where he put it!”

“Quak!”

“Autor.” Fakir finally found his voice. “Why are you in my house in the middle of the night throwing books at Ahiru?”

“Because it should be past midnight, and isn’t!” Autor folded his arms and glared. “My clock struck twelve… and then an hour later it struck thirteen.” 

“So take it to a clockmaker in the morning and have it fixed, idiot.” Fakir was in no mood to be polite. “Don’t come pounding down my door over it.”

“The town clock also struck thirteen.” Autor paused. “And when I stepped out of my room, nothing was moving.”

“Well, if it’s not windy--”

“Nothing’s moving because _time isn’t passing_.”

Fakir glanced at his clock. The minute and hour hands were both neatly lined up with the XII, the pendulum still. He turned back to Autor. “Why didn’t you say that at the start?” he demanded. Ignoring Autor’s indignant sputtering, he retrieved the latest story from the top of the stack.

“Here. There should be seven pages.” He thrust the paper at Autor. “Wake me up when you’ve figured out what’s wrong.” He turned to go back to his room.

“No! Do something productive! Go see if other timepieces work.”

Fakir’s clock was silent -- the lack of tick was almost eerie, now that he noticed it. There was a sundial in the backyard, but that of course was worthless at night. Searching for something to do, Fakir turned on the faucets (which didn’t run), and tried a few lamps. The first wouldn’t light, but the second -- Ahiru’s favorite, although he’d never known why -- did.

And the eggtimer from the kitchen worked. While Autor muttered over his story, Fakir watched the grains trickle down and form a small mountain of sand. When it finished, he turned it over.

Autor snarled something inarticulate, flung the papers down on the table, and pulled out an atlas.

Fakir sat down with the egg timer. Ahiru settled on his lap. They watched the sand fall, counting the seconds that passed nowhere but this room.

Eighteen minutes passed this way. Fakir kept nodding off, only to be nudged awake by Ahiru when the timer needed turning.

Ahah! I’ve found the problem. You described tonight as the longest night of the year,” Autor said, sounding far too pleased with himself.

“Yes, because it is,” Fakir said, trying to snatch the sheet of paper back, but not wanting to tear it. “I even looked up the times for sunrise and sunset -- 08.09 to 21.24. That’s eight hours and fifteen minutes of sunlight. Look, I even said so in the story -- the cold, dark night lasted sixteen and three-quarters of an hour.”

Autor looked disappointed. “Oh. Well. Then you obviously screwed up somewhere else.”

“I-” Fakir began, but was cut off by a single tolling of his clock. Everyone stared at the swinging pendulum.

“Well. It seems the problem took care of itself,” Fakir said eventually. It was strange, how noisy the night was -- the tick of the clock, the wind whistling around the house, creaks of the house itself, and the soft thump of snow tumbling from the roof after a particularly strong gust.

“Hmm. Given the time it took me to assess the situation, plus travel time… how long was I here, do you think?”

“Twenty-something minutes.”

“Hmm.” Autor smirked. “Well, Fakir, it looks like you managed to add precisely one extra hour to the day. More or less. Now that we know the precise symptom, we can better identify its cause.” He turned back to the papers. “Hmm, those minutes do add up to exactly an hour, so it can’t be that…”

“Quak?”

“Quiet, I’m reading,” Autor chided the duck. “I need to see where this extra hour came from. Hmm… _the night was as black as pitch_? No, as cliche as that is, that wouldn’t change the _duration_ ….”

“Quak!”

“Fakir, either give your duck human speech or quiet her, I’m trying to find the cause of-”

“ _Quak!_ ” Ahiru sounded exasperated now. 

“Ahiru, do you know what’s wrong?” Fakir asked.

Ahiru nodded. She went quiet, looking like she was thinking hard, then, quite deliberately, quacked evenly for a good long while.

“Lots of quak- oh!” Fakir caught her meaning too late. “Sorry, you were counting?”

Ahiru nodded, then repeated her count. Eight. Then, after Fakir confirmed it, she counted off another sixteen.

“Eight and sixteen… that’s… daylight and night hours today. For a total twenty-four. The number of hours in a day.”

Ahiru started counting off again. Fakir cut her off. “Are you counting minutes now? Because that will be a lot -- oh. _Oh._ ”

“Are you two done making noise?” Autor asked sullenly. “I’m _trying_ to find the cause of-”

“Ahiru figured out the problem.” Fakir cleared his throat. “The story describes eight hours and fifteen minutes of daylight, and sixteen hours and forty-five minutes of night.”

“For a total of twenty-four hours, yes, I know how long a day is, thank yo-”

“Twenty-five.”

“What?”

“Twenty-five hours total.”

Autor blinked. His eyes went off to the side, his lips moving slightly in mental computation. Then his mouth spread into that maddening, superior smirk. “I can’t believe you made time stop for an entire hour because you couldn’t do basic arithmetic!”

“You didn’t catch it, either,” Fakir snapped, fighting the blush that burned clean across his face. What a mortifying mistake to make. “I was writing, I was distracted. Anyway.” He cleared his throat. “It was just an hour. And it’s over! No harm done. Can you please go home and let us get some sleep?”

Autor snorted. “Just an hour, he says. Anyway. No. We still need to discuss something.”

“What _now_?” Now that they’d solved the problem, Fakir very much wanted Autor to stop smirking at him and _go away_ so he could go die of embarrassment.

“Why are you wasting all of your time and ability, not to mention endangering the very fabric of reality, just for a duck?”

“Quak!”

“No offense meant, Ahiru,” Autor added. “But at the end of Drosselmeyer’s story, Fakir -- both of you -- seemed pretty adamant that it was best for everyone to regain their true selves. And for Ahiru, that means being a duck, not a girl.”

Fakir sighed and crossed the room to the bookshelf. Once there he scanned the shelves, sighed, and bent to dig through the pile of books still on the floor from Autor’s rampage. 

“It’s not the lifespan, is it?” Autor asked. “Because domestic ducks can live quite long.. well, for ducks. And I’ve never seen a species with her coloration, especially those blue eyes, so her lifespan could be even-”

Fakir found the book he was looking for. He flipped through, back and forth until he found the correct chapter, then handed the open book to Autor.

“What’s this?” Autor looked at the cover, keeping his thumb to mark the chapter. “ _Anatomy and Behavior of Waterfowl_? And you’ve got it open to Chapter 7… reproduction? Huh.” 

He started to read. He turned the page. He turned the page again.

Then, white-faced, he closed the book and handed it back to Fakir. “I… see.” He swallowed. "I would not wish that on her either."

Fakir smiled crookedly. “A good thing _one_ of us knows how to do the research.”

**Author's Note:**

> All information about language and gender, feathers, and sunrise and sunset angles and times in Nördlingen, Germany (the historic walled city that Gold Crown Town is based on) is accurate to the best of my knowledge. "Quak" is the German onomatopoeia for, well, "quack."
> 
> Also, if you don't already know why Fakir and Autor are so horrified by it, be advised that duck reproduction is really horrific from a human standpoint, even moreso when considered in connection with Ahiru. Google at your own risk. 
> 
> I would also like to thank several anonymous-until-author-reveals individuals for their cheerleeding, beta-reading, duck-fact-checking, and idea-bouncing!


End file.
